Nearly 5 years after the recession started, “Not in Labor Force, Want a Job Now” still near the highs.

Here is the BLS chart on the “Not in Labor Force, Want a Job Now” series.

And here is a chart (Source: BLS, Bloomberg) showing the trailing 12-months deficit (represented positive) versus Payrolls. You can see why there’s some reason to think the massive spending (blue line) curtailed further job losses in the recession, although it’s important to remember that we don’t know the counterfactual…that is, what would have happened in the absence of spending.

The graph does not imply that if the government had not run a huge deficit that we would have had continuing job losses, even though that is the tale our elected representatives would like you to believe. Indeed, look at the next chart, which shows the level of the deficit versus the 12-month acceleration/deceleration in job growth, lagged 12 months.

If there seems to be a correlation between big deficits and job market acceleration, it comes mainly from the big swings associated with the teeth of the crisis when the causality may have been going either direction. Take out that big “S” and you have similar jobs growth with huge government and with small government (and you can see that same fact on the prior chart).